BitDanceΒΆ

Making the Bits Dance

This is the personal web presence of R. David Murray. I’ve had this domain since December of 1993, when I started working as the technical lead creating a non-profit ISP in southwestern New Hampshire, back when the World Wide Web was just beginning to get graphical. I ran the servers and programmed the web sites as dialup grew and then as it died. Released from bondage to both the pager and the boss by the dissolution of the third ISP for which I was technical director (I left the first to be partner in the second which we sold to the third), I became an independent consultant in 2005.

I’ve always loved Open Source, from before anyone knew what it was. I learned computing working on IBM mainframes at the University of Pennsylvania Physics Department Computing Facility, and although the mainframe OS was proprietary, we had the source, and there was a thriving community that hacked on it. I made the transition to Unix along with the Physicists, and latched on to BSDOS/FreeBSD when I needed an OS to run that New Hampshire ISP. When Linux matured, I switched to it.

I found Python in 1993 as well, using it for all sorts of automation tasks for the ISP, and even wrote an accounting system in it. Later I used it for web development. My first Open Source contributions were to the Zope3 project back when it was just getting started.

In 2008 I started contributing directly to the Python language, becoming a core contributor the next year at PyCon. Before long I wound up becoming the new maintainer of the Python Email package, which has been my major area of contribution since, though I also make an effort to try to check in standard library patches prepared by non-committers.

As a consultant, I do IT support work and contract programming, both through the company in which I am a partner, Murray and Walker, Inc.

As an Open Source contributor, I work primarily on the Python Standard Library in general and the Email package in particular. But I have other projects as well, some of which have made it as far as getting posted at my github account.

If you want to support my Open Source work (and nothing would please me more than to be able to contribute all the code I write to the world), you can do so via gittip.